TalkTalk says WalkWalk if you've got a mouldy Tiscali email address, or pay £50 a year to keep it

While TalkTalk Mail remains free for our broadband customers, all other users will now be required to pay a small fee. These users can save £2.50 a month with TalkTalk Mail compared to BT."

Or you could use any of the other free providers.

Alternatively..

Buy a domain with a host who does e-mail redirect.

Use a reputable free e-mail service, redirect above catch all e-mail to it.

Job done. Whenever any free service shut down, redirect where you are sending mail. Been doing this since the 90s.

pipex

Given they've only recently dropped the pipex address I've had for many years it's about time tbh

Reminds me of when banks invented the maintenance fee (or whatever they call it) to deal with interest earning accounts that just keep growing endlessly after a person dies. Meh, I don't see why free email should be forever.

"Way back in 2010, Tiscali actually ranked second in the UK behind BT on broadband subscribers, before a 2009 merger with TalkTalk. Its corporate parent killed the brand the following year."

If by "killing the brand" you mean discontinuing it, OK. From my PoV their behaviour in "traffic shaping" killed it even quicker then although in my case it was Nldram which had been gobbled once prior to Tiscali's swallowing it although Tiscali's damage to customer support hadn't helped.

Plenty...

Plenty of decent free email providers out there that don't charge a bean - just use a mail redirect. I'm with GMX primarily who are ok, but I also have couple of Protonmail ones that I'm holding for future use. I'll put my sad sorry hands up and say that I also have a legacy Gmail one - but I'm slowly running that down, with the upside being that once I have I never need to log into ANY Google service ever again.

I guess charging a fee for none Talktalk customers is better than just closing the accounts, but £5 PM does seem a lot for just an email address. Especially when there are several free webmail services available.

If your privacy conscious and worried about having a Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc then as others have mentioned, you can buy a domain name and setting up your own email and you have full control over it and it would be cheaper than even the £50 annual fee with Talktalk.

"provision of a free email address years after one stops being a paying customer is rather generous in this day and age."

It certainly is. Although here in Ireland, I still have an @eircom.net email address that's active - 17 years since I was last a paying customer of theirs. They've been through a name change since then too.

I generally use it as a throwaway address to register for all sorts of shite, and maybe check it once every two or three months.

No problem

I have both Tiscali and TalkTalk addresses (amongst others) but have not experienced the lovely TalkTalk's ISP service for some time. There is a little key somewhere (now where did I put it?) that says "delete". No problem - all gone.

Better than EE with Freeserve

At least Tiscali e-mail holders have the option to keep their e-mail addresses. EE didn't give Freeserve e-mail holders that option. I only found out when I got an email from a company who had my address asking for a replacement prior to Freeserve's closure. It took most of day letting holders of that address that it was about to die and to use a replacement.

Thankfully they fixed the login issue I was having...

which allowed me to go in and change the password and autoreplies etc.

The account got pwned because their servers only accepted plaintext POP/IMAP/SMTP login credentials for years and years and years. Probably still the same, actually.

That ticks one job off the list

Last year I spent about five months going back and forth with Talk Talk to get them to close an old Tiscali email account of mine. They finally said that they could not find such old email accounts on their servers, even though I was able to supply them with info fromt he time I had an all-singing, all dancing Tiscali account.

So they will be doing me a favour without any more back-and-forth by shutting off these accounts (I guess they'll find mine).

Who knew I'd ever say 'Yay Talk Talk!"

Outrageous. I still remember when Tiscali slurped Lineone and removed our newsgroup access. Revenge is a dish best served 20+ years cold

Breathe takes its last breath

Anyone else remember early-00s ISP Breathe's offer for "free freephone-dialup Internet forever* for a one-off £120 (ish)"?

*Forever = Until we realise we launched a wholly unstainable product and get slurped by Tiscali.

Another legacy e-mail gone. No flowers please.

ZEN?

Comes with a fixed IP address. Also sell Domain Names. Drop £36 on a Pi 3A. Sam Hobbs will tell you how to set up a mail server. Basically unlimited e-mail for Domain renewal per year. I've been doing that prior to and including ZEN for about 8 years.

Tiscali.co.uk

I dropped them when they went to TalkTalk, and moved to another supplier, but have kept that Tiscali address since. They recently changed the mail system, and I lost reliable mail for several weeks. Their customer service was abominable, and these factors have added together to ensure I never ever deal with them again. I put a redirect on my mail when I got it back and have been advising those I want to know, and am ignoring the spammers.

Toucansurf?

Literally yesterday I was asked by someone on TalkTalk about how they could migrate their Toucansurf email if they leave TalkTalk. Sadly, this article contains the answer - they can't, really, any more, they'll have to start paying for it!

The old chap asking has, as you can guess, had that email since the dawn of Internet time, and it's known around the world.

Screaming......

I still have a screaming.net email who think were WorldOnline or some such biz (initial dial up account) who were slurped by Tiscali.

I have been receiving these emails for some weeks and have used the time to basically delete everything in the account.

Great - they are closing the email they leaked to the world.

I was with tiscali for a few years and as someone has said 2nd to BT for service (Though Im not sure that BT service was really No 1!)

Maybe number 2?) Anyway moved on as Talktalk seemed to just asset strip the best bits from inter alia Tiscali

I kept the emails (2) thinking they might improve and I might give them another go. They "managed" to go downhill from then on including getting one account on a spammers listing. Gives me hours of fun on spamcop and pinterest reporting images.

I read all the stories of LIneone Tiscali and other "customers all being frozen out when their password suddenly "failed"

They could only reset it by going into their online TalkTalk account and resetting , which of course they couldnt do as they didnt have an account. A few months back there was a sort of amnesty for a while where a lot of us had to change our passwords and were allowed to see the "New" Talktalk site. Presumably to lure us back. The password change seemed to go quite well

but I cant understand why they went to the bother when a few months later they are closing the accounts down.

Writing was on the wall however and I have moved what I need so will untill closed will just use their resources to report spam to them. Not that I think they do anything - I have criticised their poor spam filtering despite emails arriving after almost half a page of TalkTalk "handling"

Not sure what I am going to do with all my spare time..LOL.

It is my understanding that when Tiscali took over BT broadband accounts they were required to maintain the free lineone.net domains and email accounts without charge to customers, when TalkTalk took over from Tiscali what was in the agreement? Did that clause remain in place?. Is TalkTalk now in breach of their legal obligations stipulated within the takeover agreement?

Stoopid question!

So if I only use my email address on my phone via the mailbox function, do I still have access? Booted talk talk years ago when they told me the broadband wasn’t broken, my brand new Apple Mac was!

Has anyone had their old talktalk accounts deleted yet?

I was quite happy to wait for it to be deleted as promised by TT. But when this didn't happen and account was hacked, I had the problems as reported here. My account still hasn't been deleted.